‘Las masas revolucionadas de esperanza’ Esperanza como palabra clave cultural en el contexto político y social latinoamericano
Keywords:
esperanza, América Latina, palabra clave cultural, TwitterAbstract
The terms esperanza (Spanish) and esperança (Portuguese) (‘hope’) are frequently used in the political and social discourse of Latin America. In this vast region, plagued by recurring political and economic crises, among other challenges, the feeling of hope is present in the media, social networks, the speech of politicians and other public figures, as well as in the urban landscape. It represents the spirit of people who are not willing to give up a better future. For this reason, we propose that the terms esperanza/esperança can be considered cultural keywords in Latin America.
In Fernández y Mattos (2022) we carried out a corpus study of the use of esperanza/esperança based on Twitter data from two Latin American countries, Argentina and Brazil. Our results confirmed our hypothesis about the centrality of the feeling of hope in the studied area. In this article, we complete our analysis with data from Mexico, Venezuela and, to a lesser extent, Peru, to find out whether the findings from Argentina and Brazil also apply to these other Latin American countries and possibly to the whole area.
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